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"Christmas Treason" is a 12,000 word story by James White, about a group of children with supernatural powers, who are afraid they will miss Christmas. The story was first published in the January, 1962 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction.

Spoiler Warning: Plot details and/or information about the ending follow. If you wish to enjoy the work first, stop reading here and return at another time.

Plot

A small group of young children from all over the world have banded together. They are between three and six years old, and each of them is blessed with some kind of supernatural power. The leader of the group is Richard, age six, with the ability to read his friends’ (but not grown ups’) minds (telepathy), and an impressive, though still juvenile, intellect. Buster (Richard’s little brother), plus Liam and Greg, have the ability to transport themselves to anyplace in the world (teleportation); and a couple of asian girls, Mub and Loo, have the ability to move objects with their minds (telekinesis).

The children meet in December, and Richard is worried about Christmas and Santa Claus, because of various disturbing clues he has picked up from the adult world. None of the kids can quite figure out how Santa Claus can visit so many houses in one Christmas night (though one boy suggests that Santa uses rockets). The local stores are filled with toys, and comments from adults seem to indicate that these are the very toys that Santa intends to deliver Christmas night (but then, why are the toys not stored at the north pole, they wonder?) Richard had seen his mother packing some toys in a box; she said they were for “orphans”, because Santa Claus never visited orphans on Christmas. “The gang had to be sure everything would be all right. Imagine waking up on Christmas morning to find you were an orphan!”

The children decide to investigate further. For the Investigation, they use their teleportation skills to find Santa’s secret cavern in the north. They are surprised, however, to find 47 different caverns. They figure these must be Santa’s caverns, because they all have rockets in them, and in the tips of the rockets are a green sparkling stuff (the kids’ don’t know quite what it is, but Richard’s dad eventually explains that they are grown up toys, and that it would be better if they didn’t have them). But none of the caverns have kids’ toys in them, and each cavern is filled with very angry soldiers. Greg guesses that Santa needs the guards to protect the toys from juvenile delinquents: “I don’t know what (juvenile delinquents) are exactly, but my Daddy says they steal and break things, and if I had kept that tractor I took from the shop I would grow up to be one.” At Richard’s urging, the kids start asking the grown ups in the caverns some questions. The only result of all of this is to make the soldiers very nervous and angry. Finally, however, Richard puts all of the clues together, and paints a disturbing picture:

The evasions of their parents, the overflowing toy stores and the computers which could direct a rocket to any spot in the world. A strangely uncomfortable deputy Santa—they must have had some kind of hold over him at the store—and secret caverns guarded by angry soldiers and storekeepers who were robbers. And juvenile delinquents, and a Santa Claus who couldn’t be found because he must have run away and hidden himself because he was ashamed to face the children and tell them that all their toys had been stolen.

Obviously the juvenile delinquents had raided Santa’s toy caverns and cleaned them out, leaving only big people’s toys which the adults themselves no longer wanted—this explained why Santa’s guards were so mad at everybody. Then the stolen toys had been sent to the storekeepers, who were probably in cahoots with the delinquents. It was as simple as that. Santa just would not be coming around this Christmas and nobody would get any toys, unless the gang did something about it . . . .

Three days before Christmas, Richard sends the kids to one of the caverns, and has them push the big red button, firing Santa’s rockets. But when the rockets finally land on their targets, their warheads are filled with the toys from the stores, which the gang had used to replace the sparkling green stuff that the grownups didn’t want anyway. But still, the kids are worried, because the toys didn’t reach their houses, in spite of all their efforts. They fear that maybe they had been bad, or had done something wrong. In the end, though, they must conclude that they couldn’t have been too bad, because Santa finally did visit them that year, just as he always had, although they were asleep when he came.

Additional Notes

This story has been reprinted in, among other places, Isaac Asimov Presents The Great SF Stories 24 (1962). Editor Martin H. Greenberg writes that "Christmas Treason was the cover story of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction at Christmas-time 1961 (the January issue was on the stands well before the cover date), and I well remember the added joy it brought to the holiday season thirty years ago."